She was home, that was the main thing. A single night in hospital had reminded her that she missed this place, these people, more than anything. She looked around the kitchen, the hearth of her life for so many years. Jenny and Hannah fussed over her, kettle boiling, cushions plumped behind her back. They were trying to seem nonchalant. She took an inventory of herself, tried to be mindful of how her body felt. Her left arm throbbed under the bandages, her chest ached. She pictured her heart beating, lungs filling with air, making her ribs expand and contract like a squeezebox. The cuts and bruises on her face burned through the painkillers, she imagined new skin trying to form already, healing herself through willpower. Mind and body weren’t separate, they were the same, she could will this to happen.
‘You OK?’ Jenny said.
This was the hundredth time Jenny had asked since she picked her up from hospital. There was something obscene about Jenny’s concern, the abdication of parenthood when your child has to worry about you. That wasn’t how things were supposed to be, but maybe Dorothy was just that age now. She was an old woman, as the pain of her body reminded her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Please sit.’
She tapped the chair next to her and Jenny sat. Hannah leaned against a worktop and held Schrödinger in her arms. Dorothy thought of Einstein and felt her throat close, pain in her chest. That damn dog had given his life for her. She needed to see him but not right now, she couldn’t handle it.
‘Please tell me where we’re at with everything,’ she said.
Jenny and Hannah gave each other a look.
‘Never mind cases and funerals,’ Hannah said. ‘You’re not up to that.’
‘I’ll decide what I’m up to.’
‘Come on, Mum,’ Jenny said.
‘Goddamn it, I’m fine.’ Even saying that took it out of her, made her head throb.
She took in the looks from the other two, felt angry but acknowledged the feeling and tried to move past it.
‘Look, Abi’s at school, Indy’s on reception, Archie is downstairs. I need things to be like normal.’
She had a flash of the jaguar over her body, the stink of her breath, the musky scent. She placed her hands on the cup of herbal tea Jenny had made for her. She thought about Irishing up the tea, still some whisky in a cupboard, but that wasn’t the way through this.
She soaked up the heat from the mug into her palms. ‘Please.’
Hannah placed Schrödinger on the ground and went to the whiteboard.
‘I’m not getting far with José’s gaslighting aliens,’ she said, pointing at a web of names including his colleagues, Olivia and Rose McAllister.
‘Meaning what?’ Dorothy said.
‘He’s done this before,’ Hannah said. ‘He was sectioned. He seems to be losing the plot. Last time I met him he said he had a second message.’
‘Could someone be falsifying the data?’ Jenny said.
Hannah shook her head. ‘We’re talking real expert level here. José knows his stuff, if someone was tampering with the numbers he would surely realise.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t want to find an answer,’ Dorothy said.
‘Then why hire me?’
‘To prove he’s right.’
‘That there are aliens out there?’
Dorothy shrugged. ‘“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”’
‘What?’
Jenny smiled. ‘Sherlock Holmes, right?’
Dorothy had given those stories to Jenny as a teenager when they were struggling to stay in touch with each other.
Hannah wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, I do think there’s intelligent life out there.’ She waved out the window at Bruntsfield Links gleaming in the sun. ‘But they’re not sending Morse code messages in English to a Spanish postgrad in Edinburgh.’
Dorothy took a sip of tea. ‘OK, how about Occam’s Razor, the simplest solution is most likely the right one.’
Hannah put on a thinking face. Dorothy wanted to get up and hug her beautiful, smart granddaughter and never let go.
Hannah tapped the whiteboard at Olivia’s name. ‘The girlfriend is the key.’
‘Why?’ Jenny said.
‘I don’t know yet, I need to speak to her again.’
Her tone put an end to questions.
Dorothy put a hand on top of Jenny’s. ‘What about your ill widow and the toyboy?’
Jenny shook her head. ‘M&M are accusing Francesco, and he’s accusing them.’
‘What?’
‘Vanessa’s kids are Maria and Matthew, M&M.’
‘So what’s your feeling?’
‘Francesco seems on the level. And it does feel like there’s something off about the twins.’
‘They’re twins?’ Hannah said.
Jenny nodded.
‘There you go,’ Hannah said. ‘Twins are always dodgy.’
Jenny laughed. ‘Maybe I’m blinded by the fact Francesco is a very beautiful man.’
Dorothy thought about how Jenny had been duped by her ex-husband. But they were all human, guided by fallible instincts.
Jenny seemed to remember something, turned to Hannah.
‘Han, what about the cameras?’
‘What about them?’
‘Are they working?’
‘As far as I know.’ Hannah pointed at Dorothy. ‘It’s not like we’ve had time to check the footage, we’ve been kind of busy.’
She was right. The jaguar, the foot, the other goddamn foot, the message from Craig, Sophia missing, Abi’s dad downstairs in a fridge, Einstein too, Indy’s parents as well, holy shit they were running out of room for all the death.
And the funerals, trying to keep a calm head for the bereaved among this seemed impossible. Dorothy looked at the funeral whiteboard, Erin Strachan, she didn’t even know who that was or what had killed her. Dorothy had always been on top of things, knowing the names of the people in the fridges, a little of who they were, who they’d left behind, the ripples they made in the universe.
That was the worst thing just now, not her injuries or the absence of answers in the cases. She didn’t feel like she was here for people grieving, for the ones left with massive holes in their lives, unable to move on, desperate to say goodbye but also not wanting to. Archie downstairs, his mother gone peacefully a year ago, her own Jim only dead for eighteen months, and she sometimes forgot he was Jenny’s father, Hannah’s grandfather. And Indy, her parents dead and buried and dug up again. And the thousands of dead people who had passed through this place with so much history and personality, all gone, returned to the universe, their energy not extinguished but converted into other forms.
Grief permeated everything, soaked into the house, through the floorboards, into the walls, down to the earth underneath where the roots of trees sucked it up into their branches and leaves. Pain and loss in the air around them, the atoms she was breathing right now into her damaged chest, coursing through the blood vessels in her arm. She rubbed the bandage, there would be a big scar. We carry scars to remind us that we’re still alive.
Her hands shook. Her eyes were blurry with tears which dropped onto the table where she’d made a thousand meals, had hundreds of arguments and laughing fits, where she hoped to have hundreds more if she could just keep going.